K-12 education companies spend a lot of time cultivating district relationships, marketing their products, and presenting information about the value of their services.
But too often, those providers waste the opportunity to make their outreach effective, by failing to use what’s known about human behavior, marketing psychology, and social science to change the way they interact with potential customers.
Nancy Harhut, chief creative officer for Harhut & Associates, helps businesses take that leap by advising them on strategies based in psychology to boost their impact on everything from pricing to advertising.
Nancy Harhut
is the chief creative officer for the marketing agency Harhut & Associates, which provides clients with marketing best practices using insights drawn from social science and behavioral economics. She previously was the chief creative officer for the Wilde Agency, and is a frequent conference speaker.
“I use marketing best practices and social science to increase the likelihood that people will read, engage with, and respond to marketing messages,” she said.
Tapping into theories around the “pain of paying,” “loss aversion,” and “anchoring” can help businesses see significant improvements in the number of people opening emails, visiting web sites, and buying products.
Harhut spoke with EdWeek Market Brief Senior Writer Michelle Davis about the strategies K-12 companies can use to improve their success. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
1. Use the “theory of social proof” in the education space.
What social scientists and behavioral economists have found is that when people are unsure what to do, they will look to others and follow their lead. This idea of following what other people do is known as social proof or social norms. So if you’re in a position where you have to make a purchase on behalf of your school or district, it’s important to feel you’re making the right choice. It’s the district’s money, you’re subject to public scrutiny and you don’t want to make the wrong choice. If you find a particular company or brand provider that a lot of other people are using, you’re going to feel there’s a certain amount of safety there.
What marketers should do is point out how many sales they’ve made, how many customers they have or schools or districts similar to the one they’re trying to sell into. When you see that people like you are making a particular choice, it provides a certain amount of comfort and confidence that you should make the same decision.
2. Put in place pricing techniques to influence how costs are perceived and how customers respond.
On a website, the same price placed in the upper right-hand corner will be perceived to be a higher price than that exact same price in the lower right-hand corner. Research studies show that people just get the sense it’s a higher price.
Also, the dollar amount 29, for example, can be expressed as $29 or $29.00. But with the .00, because it takes up more space, the brain reads it as a larger number. What I always say to clients is, if you’re expressing savings, use that decimal point and the two zeros. When it says you can save $29.00, the brain just reads that as a larger number than $29. If you’re talking about the costs, don’t use the decimal point and the two zeros, because the brain will see that as a smaller number.
Some tests have shown that making the dollar sign about half the size as the actual numeral helps, because it minimizes that notion of spending money.
3. Understand the “pain of paying” to encourage purchases.
Social scientists and neuroscientists have found there’s something called the pain of paying. The same part of your brain is activated when you feel physical pain, and when you have to reach into your wallet and hand over money. Anything you can do to minimize that is good. If, as a company, you can offer your clients a bundle of services for a single price, that minimizes the impact of the pain.
4. Use the concept of “anchoring” to make your product’s prices more attractive.
The very first price people are exposed to is what will be their reference point. The truth is, we often don’t know what the absolute value of something is—we just don’t really know what something should cost. So when a company says, “I can offer you this product at this price,” the first price a customer is exposed to becomes the anchor.
I always recommend to clients that if you have a series of different products, have your most expensive one first, and list your less expensive ones below that. People will compare, so the second and the third price will seem, relatively speaking, like a good deal compared with the first one.
If you’re putting something on sale, list the original price at the left and the sale price to the right. Because the original price on the left becomes the anchor and with the sale price on the right, people will say, relatively speaking, this is a good deal. Some companies put the sale price first and then to the right of it they’ll say what it originally was. They lose the opportunity to set that anchor and make it work for them.
5. Highlight powerful words in email marketing.
It’s most important to be relevant and to keep emails short, to the point, and easy to scan. Use subheads, numbers, bullets. It’s proven that there are certain words that attract the human eye. So use those words in the subject line: words like new, you, free. Frontload them because over half of emails are opened on mobile devices these days and things get cut off, so put those keywords upfront. Personalization, using someone’s name and their school district or school, helps to create a much more relevant message.
6. Feature strong visual cues to call attention to messages.
Research has shown that using a coupon, either online or offline, will increase readership by 23 percent regardless of what—if any—value is inside that coupon. It’s not the coupon that has the strong psychological effect, it’s the dashed line that usually appears around it. We are so hard-wired as human beings to expect something of value inside that dashed line that we automatically look. If there’s something that you want people to read, even if you’re not giving a discount, but it’s important news or instructional information or a good benefit, I suggest putting a dashed line around it and seeing what it does in terms of grabbing people’s attention and engagement.
7. Investigate strategies that might work well in education.
You can tap into something called “availability bias.” Social scientists have found that people will judge the likelihood of an event happening based on how readily they can recall an example. In this case, the event we’re going to talk about is their need for your service or product. Before you say, “Hey, make this purchase,” first get your prospect to think about a time in the past when having your product or service would have really come in handy. Or just get them to imagine a time in the future when it would fit into their operations. It gets people to consider the likelihood that they would be able to use this, and lowers the barriers to purchase.
8. Tap into the “authority principle” to leverage the perception of your product.
Ever since we were children, we are taught to recognize and respect authority. By the time we’re adults, it’s ingrained in us. A company selling to educators might point to the ratings they have from an independent authority, or to write-ups and reviews they have received in an educational publication, or a testimonial from a well-known educator or school system. It lends an air of authority and credibility to the product.
Sometimes clients will say, “I haven’t been able to land that type of endorsement yet.” You can become an authority yourself by starting to publish different pieces of information that your target market will find useful. That creates the idea that you’re the authority on this subject matter. It’s a nice way to tap into the authority principal, even as you’re trying to get the endorsement or the news coverage of your product or service.
So there are two sides to the authority principal: one is tapping what’s out there, the other is creating the impression that you’re the authority.
9. Overcome spending barriers with gradual “asks.”
The consistency principle would apply here. Once people make a decision, they like to remain consistent in that decision. What that means for marketers is that once you get one “yes” from a person, you’re more likely to get a second yes or a third yes. It’s particularly true if your first ask is relatively small.
In a longer sales cycle, if you can start to get that series of yes responses and you can start to escalate that ask, you’re going to be in a much better position. Maybe your first ask is to get someone to download a checklist about how to evaluate a new learning management system, and then you move along and start to escalate. Maybe now they’re going to read your blog post, or tune in to a webinar you’re offering. You start to bring people down the sales continuum and each ask requires a little bit more commitment.
You escalate your asks as you get closer to the point where you get someone to answer that ultimate ask—which is to make a purchase. But it keeps them involved and now you’ve got that momentum going.
10. Employ loss-aversion techniques to create urgency, even in a long sales cycle.
There are times when loss aversion can be very powerful: this offer is only good for a certain amount of time, there’s a deadline to it, an expiration date to it. Certainly the product is still going to be around, but you’re throwing in something extra or a discount. Social scientists have found people are twice as motivated to avoid the pain of loss as they are to achieve the pleasure of gain. As marketers, we’re always talking about the benefit that you’re going to get if you buy a product or service, but every once in a while injecting a bit of loss aversion can be helpful.
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